West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey sued the Catholic diocese of Wheeling-Charleston and its former bishop Michael J. Bransfield on Tuesday, charging that they “knowingly employed pedophiles and failed to conduct adequate background checks” for people working in Catholic schools and camps, a news release from Morrisey’s office says.

The lawsuit, the latest dramatic civil action against the American church in the past year, alleges violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. It accuses the diocese of advertising safe environments for children while at the same time, the complaint says, choosing “to cover up and conceal arguably criminal behavior of child sexual abuse.”

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, facing fallout from a lawsuit claiming she fired an aide who said she was sexually assaulted by a supervisor at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, said on Wednesday she had decided to resign as the foundation’s chairwoman.

Ms. Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat in her 13th term, also stepped aside temporarily from an important House Judiciary subcommittee chairmanship, the committee said.

The congresswoman made the decision to step aside from both roles as pressure was growing within her own party to account for the claims in a Jan. 11 lawsuit brought by a woman who worked in her congressional office and who said she was sexually assaulted by a Black Caucus Foundation supervisor. Ms. Jackson Lee has adamantly denied that she fired the woman for retribution after the woman indicated she wanted to pursue legal action.

Now that the U.S. government is threatening to define gender as only male or female, we need to fight more than ever for transgender rights. But the idea there should be no gender categories and we should live in a label-free world, as some have argued, is a utopian dream.

Pioneering scholar Dennis Altman spoke for many gay and lesbian activists at the beginning of the modern queer rights movement in 1971 when he suggested the battle for acceptance of human and legal rights for gay and lesbian people had only one goal: the eradication of the need for any such rights at all.

According to Altman, categories of sexuality were a necessary evil, but in an ideal world they would be replaced by “a new human who is no longer imprisoned by limitations of sexuality and compassion….”

Cultural theorists Daniel Harris and Bert Archer continue to embrace Altman’s original utopian vision. Harris gleefully announced the death of both gay culture and straight oppression in his 1997 book, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture:

A Florida psychologist who has compared homosexuality to obsessive-compulsive disorder and claimed that he could change clients’ sexual orientation through therapy was found soliciting “hookups” on gay dating apps, according to LGBTQ nonprofit Truth Wins Out.

Norman Goldwasser, clinical director of Horizon Psychological Services in Miami Beach, Florida, allegedly used the screen name “hotnhairy72” to meet other men on Manhunt and Gay Bear Nation. The Manhunt profile, which has since been deleted, includes several nude images that appear to be of Goldwasser and lists a number of interests, including “dating,” “kissing,” “married men,” “massage” and a series of more explicit activities, according to screenshots provided to NBC News by Truth Wins Out.

President Donald Trump tweeted a new ad that is almost too racist to believe on Wednesday.

The ad from Trump’s campaign, which accuses Democrats of allowing Mexicans and Central Americans to murder Americans, is the latest escalation in Republicans’ very obvious attempts to stoke fear about brown people and distract from unpopular conservative policies. The president’s party is widely expected to lose control of one chamber of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

While smearing immigrants is a time-honored tradition for many on the right, the president’s efforts to make a major campaign issue out of a migrant caravan traveling north from Central America (and currently 1,000 miles away from the U.S. border) has been echoed by prominent Republicans, Fox News, and numerous other propagandists in conservative media.

But don’t just take our word for it. Let’s dig into the data to show why Republicans’ recent cherry-picking has no basis in reality.

Jon Bon Jovi is clearly not who you’d call if you want to binge on reality TV. The “Livin’ on a Prayer” singer dished on his feelings toward the current celebrity culture in an interview on Sunday, October 28, and didn’t hold back.

Stars Who Got Their Start on Reality TV Opens a New Window.“I think it’s horrific that we live in that world and I can tell you I’ve never given 60 seconds of my life, ever, to one of those Housewives of Blah Blah and Kardashians,” the 56-year-old singer told Australia’s The Sunday Project.

Damon Young over at The Root has created a handy list of all the things straight men should not do if they don’t want to be mistaken for a homosexual, including eating lollipops, riding bikes, keeping a regular skincare regimen, and getting prostate exams.

Now before you get all worked up, you should know he’s been totally ironic.

The video was inspired by comments rapper Wiz Khalifa made earlier this year about why straight men shouldn’t eat bananas in public because people might get the wrong idea about your sexuality.

CNN Senior Political Analyst John Avlon has slammed President Donald Trump for his record on LGBTQ rights, saying, “To credibly be called leader of the free world, you have to actually stand up for freedom.”

Avlon was speaking on Wednesday morning's “Reality Check” segment on the CNN show New Day. He was reacting to the news that the Trump administration will no longer grant visas to the same-sex domestic partners of foreign diplomats and U.N. officials. The policy went into effect on October 1, reversing a policy that has been in place since 2009.

“As in so many other cases, the Trump administration's stated purpose seems innocuous,” Avlon said. “Gay marriage is allowed in the United States, so why allow same-sex partners when unmarried heterosexual partners are not allowed in the country? But that ignores what it would do to diplomats from the many countries that do not recognize gay marriage or, much worse, still criminalize being gay.”

Criminal statutes banning homosexuality are on the books in 74 countries, eight of which include the death penalty, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA).

A gay deputy headmaster of a boys' school in Zimbabwe has resigned after death threats and pressure from parents.

Neal Hovelmeier, who worked at St John's College in the capital, Harare, faced huge criticism and threats from parents after he revealed his sexual orientation to his students at an assembly September 21.

Hovelmeier came out after a local newspaper threatened to write an article exposing his sexuality. He told CNN the paper "felt that did not sit well with my position in a boys' school in a conservative country."

The 32-year-old founder of Tribute.co, a video montage platform recently dubbed by the New Yorker as "Hallmark 2.0," recalled throwing things and slamming doors – but never actually expressing his anger. So, one of the attendees in his men's-only meeting group handed him a pillow while the others encouraged him to scream into it. He let out a guttural release of primal rage.

"I felt a lot better," he explained.

Horn says the key to unlocking his emotions has been discovering "modern masculinity," a movement of men exploring their emotions in small group settings.

Penn Badgley is clarifying comments he made during an interview in which he said he was “molested” after becoming famous on Gossip Girl.

“The point of my comment was not to confess a personal trauma. I was speaking about the way emotional and physical boundaries are violated for someone in the public eye, who is seen as an object of desire,” Badgley, 31, said in a statement to PEOPLE on Monday.

RuPaul’s Drag Race season 9 runner-up Peppermint has broken new ground wherever she's gone. Initially becoming the first-ever competitor to enter Drag Race as an out trans woman, Peppermint continued her revolutionary career by starring as the non-binary Pythia in Head Over Heels -- making her the first-ever trans person to originate a starring role on Broadway.

Adorned in a spangled-up dress and a crown, naturally, she spoke to GQ in a searing feature that covered the historical lack of trans representation on Broadway, the ground she's breaking for other trans women, and that one review of Head Over Heels.